Kliuless? Gaming Industry ICYMI #1

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Hi, my name is Kenny, and I work in Revenue Strategy at Riot Games. Each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I share with other Rioters, including Riot’s senior leadership. This edition marks the inaugural public version that I will publish broadly every week going forward as well. Opinions are mine.

Though Fortnite has not yet completely transitioned to becoming a platform, Epic has taken a couple steps towards that direction already

For example, they added a sandbox-like Playground Mode, and have incrementally added improvements to it over time

“Toys” (e.g., golf balls, basketballs, volleyballs) were also added to the game even though they serve no functional purpose in Battle Royale

As this Medium post suggests, Fortnite is "much more than just a game":

"For my sons and a lot of kids their age, Fortnite is not a game they play, it’s a place they go — and, importantly, it’s a place they go with friends and not with Mom and Dad. It’s fulfilling the same development role as those illicit teen spaces from the 1970s and ’80s — those dodgy youth clubs, arcades, and video stores that we discovered unchaperoned.

Teenagers are caught in a crappy sociocultural Catch-22: Adults are worried their kids are spending too much time on smartphones and consoles, but at the same time they’re constantly policing and restricting access to physical environments"

Each incremental piece of content Epic adds into Fortnite widens their competitive moat in the battle royale genre

Every improvement continually raises players' baseline expectations by which all other competitors would be judged

Sound familiar? It should, because this is one of the ways League established MOBA market dominance with each new champion pool addition

TimefireVR launches Hypatia, a virtual city and social playground in VR

China

China's government issued a notice that they will control the number of new online games to be approved, and explore implementing an appropriate age-restriction system for games to help limit and prevent myopia in minors

>80% of netizens in lower tier Chinese cities described the mobile phone as their favourite pastime and said they were happy to spend almost all their leisure on it

How big data helped ‘China’s Netflix’ iQiyi decide to back The Story of Yanxi Palace, a summer blockbuster about back-stabbing concubines

"After all, his algorithms have concluded that the show, set in the court of Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), would likely be a winner, based on big data analysis of past viewership patterns of similarly themed shows.

Both man and machine proved right as ﻿Yanxi Palace concluded its run on China’s biggest online video streaming platform, garnering more than 13 billion views so far and smashing the one-day viewership record earlier this month. Big data analysis was again employed to determine the optimal time and pace of releasing new episodes to build up viewer anticipation."